By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 12 Because love is the language of celestials & I have known love as intimately as a boy knows his mother’s call. I have kissed the moon’s collarbone & knows how it feels to…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 11 Stay Tonight let’s calibrate our hearts with longings, let’s remove the spectacle on the night’s eyes & let her watch our dwindling bodies scouting desires with fingers & moans, let her watch in…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 10 Ife Oloyin ~after listening to Beautiful Nubia Ànìké, here is my love, take, eat & be full. here is my heart, make music of its beats. here is my body, pin it to…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 9 Ode to love because there is always something familiar about twilights where silence blooms with the memory of a black girl, like the shore on your chest, once, I laid my head &…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 8 A love song with plenty birds & baritones even in the dark, what shows us the way is another body. -Romeo Oriogun & you’ve shown me ways out of me, out of the…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 7 Ayanfe this poem begins with the road that led me to you, blessed be the birds singing your name between tree branches, blessed be the moon compassing me from rivers to cities, to…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 6 The Things I Can Say About Loving You It’s like halting chaos to breathe in oceans/ I could think of you & become a vapor of light/ rippling the deadness in a body…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 5 & love said It’s not good for a man to be alone I know this because God is love, because a lone man is a place where birds are not singing, where grief…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 4 Ìfé mi my love for you is a verb, like a flower singing into the sky, like a bird lip-syncing the songs of memory in a deserted town, because you heart bears the…

By Olabisi Abiodun Akinwale: ÀNÌKÉ- Day 3 Of Love & Comets I have tried gathering bits of me together in a baritone casting silence into music, tried finding my lost rib in the absence grief made clear, I had forgotten…